A simple but powerful project management tool. Andrea Vascellari, digital marketing consultant and CEO ofitive.net, shares how you can use Google Calendar is great for managing appointments, but that's not all it can do.

The sharing, searchability, timeline view, and other features make Google Calendar Google Calendar for your teamand with your clients. Do you need a great tool to better manage your team, timelines, deadlines, relevant project's data for you, and for your clients? Here's how Google Calendar can help you out.

Create a calendar for each project – To preserve client privacy I temporarily changed the title of each calendaryou see in this first screenshot. The syntax though remains the same, ‘year' (11=2011, 10=2010, etc.) andthen the ‘name of the project'. Using a proper syntax helps you to keep your calendar in order and makesthem easier to browse/search.

Sharing – Share the calendar with the members of your team involved in the project. You can even share calendarswith clients if they express the need to monitor the stream of activities and project deadlines. I've been in thissituation a couple of times.

Timeline – By placing the tasks on the calendar you'll automatically turn each calendar into a detailed project'stimeline. I found the ‘agenda' view particularly valuable because it gives a clear overview of the upcomingdeadlines you have set.

Manage client access – Like I said above when I was talking about ‘sharing', sometimes you can plan to give (or theclients want to have) access to the calendar/timeline. A problem I faced is that in complex projects you might wantto create two versions of the calendar. One for the team with the technical details they need/want to edit during the project development, and a second one for the client with all its relevant information (periodic results,deadlines, key data, meetings, etc.). On larger projects you can create dedicated calendars for multiple teams, too.

Problem solving – With every project comes a good number of problems, roadblocks or issues. Often these issuesare spotted by members of the team while they are taking care of their tasks. What can be done? The member of the team that is facing the problem writes it in the calendar as an ‘all day' entry adding his/her name next to it. Other members of the team, that can/know how to solve the issue, take care of it or write on the entry tips on howto solve it. Once the problem is solved the entry will be marked as FIXED. If at the end of the day the problem is still not fixed, it can be moved (click & drag) to the next day or to a different date. I know that at first this might not soundeasy or natural but I can guarantee you that, once you get into it, it will help you working faster and better with yourteam. It's like an open and on-going problem solving channel. Of course, the internal organization of how and whotakes care of solving problems can change from company to company and team to team. You can really take this tothe next level by enabling your team to add the ‘mobile' component to it (check the links I shared at the end of thispost to learn how to sync these features with your iPhone).

Hashtags # – I mentioned the use of hashtags for internal data management in a couple of other posts but I'll bringit back in this one, too. Google calendar is searchable (I'll never get tired to remind it!). This is very important because it turns our calendar into a database. Using hashtags in our calendar's entries helps us in searchingand tracking specific items over time. Use a unique hashtag for each project you work on. The tags are the same I use with my team in tweets and shared content (photos, video, etc.). Result? Whenever I search fora hashtag I'll get a complete list of the performed tasks with relative date and time. Here's where thingsget interesting, go on reading the next point…

Export data (PDF) – Every calendar, search results or specific layouts (day, week, month, 4 days, agenda)are printable and therefore exportable in PDF format. This is really handy when you need a summaryof the work you've done (you can get it by searching for a specific hashtag related to a project) or forthe list of future tasks of your project (printing/PDF the ‘agenda' layout is what works at best for me).Believe it or not there might still be occasions in which people will ask you for a PDF version of thedata. It happened to me with external teams and clients (especially government and public organizations, they often still need something to print out on paper. Well yes they could accessit online but… you go and figure that out).

Not to worry. The rest of your day need not be a disaster. It can in fact become one of your best, providing you take these simple steps:

1. Remember that the past does not equal the future.

There is no such thing as a "run of bad luck." The reason people believe such nonsense is that the human brain creates patterns out of random events and remembers the events that fit the pattern.

2. Refuse to make self-fulfilling prophesies.

If you believe the rest of your day will be as challenging as what's already happened, then rest assured: You'll end up doing something (or saying) something that will make sure that your prediction comes true.

3. Get a sense of proportion.

Think about the big picture: Unless something life-changing has happened (like the death of a loved one), chances are that in two weeks, you'll have forgotten completely about whatever it was that has your shorts in a twist today.

4. Change your threshold for "good" and "bad."

Decide that a good day is any day that you're above ground. Similarly, decide that a bad day is when somebody steals your car and drives it into the ocean. Those types of definitions make it easy to be happy–and difficult to be sad.

5. Improve your body chemistry.

Your body and brain are in a feedback loop: A bad mood makes you tired, which makes your mood worse, and so forth. Interrupt the pattern by getting up and moving around. Take a walk or eat something healthy.

6. Focus on what's going well.

The primary reason you're convinced it's a bad day is that you're focusing on whatever went wrong. However, for everything going badly, there are probably dozens of things going well. Make list, and post it where it's visible.

7. Expect something wondrous.

Just as an attitude of doom and gloom makes you see more problems, facing the future with a sense of wonder makes you alive to all sorts of wonderful things that are going on, right now, everywhere around you.